Last year, a news helicopter hovered over the Morrison home the Perrys have shared for nearly 40 years. “Twenty minutes later, a news truck showed up, and we were live on all the news channels at once.”

The Perrys started lighting their home for the holidays about 35 years ago. “The tradition began with Jim’s father, John Perry, who won the contest for best lighting in Lakewood many years in a row in the ’60s and ’70s,” Jo e-mailed.

The display features a section for kids, and Jo estimates the number of light bulbs at around 30,000. “Thousands and thousands,” Jim says. It spans three sides of the Perrys’ yard.

The spectacle is lighted from 5 p.m. to 10 p.m. weeknights and until 11 p.m. on the weekends, and the traffic to see it is steady. Limousines cruise the street and families bring children to wander past.

Anyone with a light display on this scale realizes sooner or later that they can attract vandals. Usually the damage is minor and easily repaired. After about 20 years of only minor incidents came the season the Perrys’ display was attacked ruthlessly night after night, tearing down or trashing everything. Eventually police caught the culprits.

“We decided to give it up,” Jim says quietly. “We gave away everything that was left of the display.”

The Perrys got about 200 letters from people who missed the attraction. After a few years they couldn’t resist rebuilding their stockpile. When they put the lights up again, they got another 200 letters.

“We must have a pretty big fan club out there,” Jim says.

Jim is slowly converting from incandescent to LEDs. About 40 percent of the lights are LEDs now.

Last year, a new neighbor moved in down the street just before Christmas. Marveling at the Perrys’ display, the neighbor remarked to Jim that they hadn’t even unpacked, let alone decorated. Jim dug up a half dozen lighted reindeer and some lights that he’d replaced with LEDs and took them to the neighbors.

The Perrys plan to donate their $25 gift card to Children’s Hospital. Their son was treated there when he was about 2 years old, Jim says. “We just about lost him, and they saved him.”

UPDATE: The morning this story was published, the Perrys woke to find their lighting vandalized once again, and the damage quite extensive.

“Little buggers placed all of the animals in sexual positions,” Jo Perry wrote in an e-mail.

The Perrys hope to have the display repaired and back to normal by Saturday night, and are installing a video surveillance system for the first time.

I work mostly behind-the-scenes helping shape and expand the digital storytelling capabilities of The Denver Post through design and development on our website. I joined The Post as a freelance web producer in 2005 before graduating from Metro State. I've lived in Denver nearly 30 years and consider it home. Outside the newsroom I enjoy film photography, hiking and Jeeping the mountains and plains, Western history, and nerdy things.